T’s spring women’s fashion issue celebrates the free thinkers whose distinct visions shape our culture today. On the cover is Bjork, whose genre-bending songs and mastery of design, technology and visuals have been pushing music forward for the past three decades, and who is being honored with her first retrospective at MoMA next month. We pay a visit to Sharjah, where the progressive sheikh’s daughter, Hoor Al Qasimi, has inherited — and subsequently boosted the profile of — a humble but growing art expo with some serious indie cred. Stateside, we take a closer look at Philip Johnson’s iconic Glass House, which may be the late architect’s greatest achievement (even if it’s not quite right to call it his home). And in the never-dull French capital, where politicians have been known to air their laundry for all to see, Liesl Schillinger spins a true-life tale of sex, lies and presidents truly befitting the City of Light. Elsewhere, Cathy Horyn assesses the promise and perils of a post-trend fashion world; a pair of authors and a visual artist spill secrets from their diaries; a writer with a rare skin condition that keeps her isolated from the outside world sheds light on her life in the darkness; the talented and at-times controversial French-Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan sets his sights on Hollywood; and the prolific makeup artist Pat McGrath gets a close-up of her own in By the Numbers. See all stories from the issue >>

Joost Bakker grows flowers he trades for bones to make soup at his restaurant, and uses the leftovers to feed his garden. Meet the poster boy for zero-waste living.

The house that Joost Bakker built in Monbulk, Australia, about an hour outside Melbourne, is wrapped with a reinforced mesh frame holding over 11,000 terracotta pots planted with leafy strawberries, and surrounded by a flower garden bordering a brush of wild eucalyptuses. The interior, where the florist lives with his wife, Jennie, and their three young daughters, is made up entirely of recyclable materials — unpolished plywood floors, industrial-felt curtains, training-wire ceiling lamps.

Inspired by what he had done with his home, the city of Melbourne commissioned him in 2008 to create a similarly sustainable temporary restaurant in the middle of prominent Federation Square. “Greenhouse by Joost” was built over two weeks in collaboration with a team of architects, farmers, chefs and environmental experts. It has since popped up in various locations, most recently at the 2012 Melbourne Food & Wine Festival, where Bakker cheekily encouraged diners to “Give pee a chance.” He collected his patrons’ urine in a large, opaque container at the entrance to the restaurant, and used it to fertilize several acres of mustard seed, which later became the oil powering Greenhouse’s generators.

“The hospitality industry is shockingly wasteful and I wanted to show that it could be done differently,” he says, as he maneuvers a large evergreen into a repurposed silo on the counter of a cafe in suburban Melbourne. Takeaway containers, in particular, rouse his ire. “They drive me bloody crazy,” he says, a wide, boyish smile softening his outrage. “If you’re going to sit around sipping coffee for 30 minutes, why can’t you just use a regular mug?” The walls of the next cafe he stops at (but not the last — much of his day is spent delivering and arranging the flowers he’s grown on his property) are lined with used paper coffee cups, which he has turned into vessels filled with bushels of fragrant cilantro. Read more…

A photograph triptych by the artist Floris Neusüss.Credit Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery

Typically, fashion editors sit at shows seeking out common threads or ideas to bring back to their offices and translate into fashion spreads that tell us what we ought to be wearing that season. This service is what you might think that we, at T, are here to provide. But times have changed. Technology and the economics of fashion have overthrown the old hegemony in which what was fashionable was proposed by designers, decreed by editors and proselytized for by department stores.

We live in what appears to be a post-trend fashion world — with no clear guidelines for our sartorial choices and an endless array of options. New shows and collections seem to be springing up constantly throughout the year, consumed hungrily and instantaneously around the world on a variety of platforms before the editors have even filed out the doors. So inundated are we with images that we’d be bored to tears with any single trend by the time it hit stores.

The solution is to rely on our own instincts, which is something that many of the women featured in this issue — musicians, writers, artists, Bjork! — have in common: an ability to filter myriad influences to create an unmistakably personal voice. Read more…

The legendary architect and his companion, the curator David Whitney, spent their weekends in the world’s most famous transparent box. Or did they?

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Philip Johnson, left, with his partner, the art curator and collector David Whitney, photographed by Mariana Cook on the Glass House property in 1995.Credit

WHEN PHILIP JOHNSON’S Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., was featured in Life magazine soon after its completion in 1949, architects and designers downed martinis at the Oyster Bar, pondering the future of the International Style. But that probably wasn’t what most people were thinking about as they looked at the pictures. They likely leaned back in their Barcaloungers and wondered: How could he actually live in a clear box, without walls, without privacy, without any stuff?

The answer was that despite our indelible impression of Johnson, the owlish man in the dapper suit and those spectacles,­­ spending his incredibly long life (he died at age 98 in 2005) in the 1,800-square-­foot transparent rectangle, silhouetted against a backdrop of greenery that he called “expensive wallpaper,” he never really did live in the Glass House. At least not in the self-­contained sense in which the rest of us occupy our homes.

Instead, the Glass House was merely the focal point of what eventually grew to be a veritable architectural theme park on 49 meticulously tended acres, comprising 14 structures, in which Johnson and David Whitney, the collector and curator who met him in 1960 and became his life partner, and who died just months after Johnson, enjoyed their impossibly glamorous weekend existence.

From the bunker­like Brick House where Johnson often slept and the tiny, turreted, post­modern Library where he worked surrounded by architecture books, to Calluna Farms, the 1905 shingled farmhouse and the subterranean art gallery, the collection of buildings formed Johnson’s idea of the perfect deconstructed home. When the Glass House compound, a National Trust for Historic Preservation site, reopens for tours in May after its usual winter break, the public will for the first time be able to visit two additional structures of the 14 — Calluna Farms and Grainger, the cozy 18th­-century timber-frame house the couple used as a TV room — at last offering a more nuanced picture of what life really was like behind glass. Read more…

AUDIENCE OF ZERO Manguso, whose journals have spanned several laptops, lives in Los Angeles and uses her landlady’s piano as a desk.Credit Photographs by Nicholas Calcott. Still life: Marko Metzinger

IN MY LATE TEENS, overburdened by an excess of life, I built a storage facility for it: a diary. After I wrote things down I could safely forget them. It was the only relief I ever found, and I kept at it. I don’t keep a routine, but the diary gets written daily — usually several times daily, even in transit, in hospitals and at parties. In little black books and, as of this year, on my phone. Since 1992 I’ve created a new text file on my computer every New Year’s Day. Whatever I have written gets transcribed into the file and I throw the draft away. A little black book is a beautiful object, but I don’t care about the objects; I care only about the words in them. Read more…

When the shoe designer Christian Louboutin decided to extend his empire into the world of beauty — and to start with nail polish — the move actually made some kind of sense. After all, he came up with his signature scarlet soles 20 years ago by impulsively painting one in the factory with a colleague’s red nail varnish.

He wanted his first beauty boutique to link back to those early days, both in location and in look. That meant staying in the Galerie Véro-Dodat, the slightly shabby yet ornate 19th-century covered passage in Paris where he opened his original store in the early 1990s, as well as recreating that shop’s intimate, jewel-box ambiance. He found the perfect space next door: a tiny shop that had served as the headquarters for a gemstone hunter. But who would do it up for him? Louboutin had long admired the work of the Paris-based interior designer Pierre Yovanovitch who has worked with Hermès and the Hôtel Marignan Paris. “In Pierre’s work, there are very few details — it’s clean,” he says. “I’m used to baroque spaces with lots of objects. When I look at one of his spaces, I wonder, like a child, ‘Why do I find a space so beautiful with so little?’ Pierre is a master of that.” Read more…

In the world of the ’50s, when Seventh Avenue was full of manufacturers and rather timid in its ideas, a well-known editor used to march into showrooms and say, “Show me the lemons!” She meant the styles that buyers had deemed too unusual but which, for that reason, she thought, held appeal. She could be assured that no one else — or, no other magazine — would have those rejected styles. They were different.

For me, the top lemon of the spring collections is Raf Simons’s white cotton smock dresses for Dior. At the time of the shows I heard people say, “Those are hideous” — drawing out the word to make it clear they thought Simons had lost his mind by showing a high-collared dress that looked like a Victorian gent’s sleeping costume. But I adored it. Squeeze me a lemon! I could imagine someone, not necessarily me, wearing the strange cotton sack with beautiful gold sandals instead of the dark boots that Simons used. And you know what would happen: Heads would turn, looks of envy and delight would appear, and suddenly everyone would wish they had a dress as cool — and odd — as that Dior smock.

I mention this because we live in a supermarket of choices, not just in what we wear but also in the kinds of food we eat, the music we listen to and the decorating styles we might choose for our homes. There is no single trend that demands our attention, much less our allegiance, as so many options are available to us at once. According to the theory of lemons, anything could be selected and prized for its very individuality and we wouldn’t look out of step. Read more…

In the beauty universe, you could say the world spins around Pat McGrath. Over the course of her three-decade career, the prolific, self-taught makeup artist has worked with in-demand models (Naomi, Gisele, Cara, Kendall), major fashion houses (Christian Dior, Versace, Prada) and the top photographers (Steven Meisel counts her among his closest collaborators). A backstage fixture, McGrath can set trends with a wave of her hands — she famously prefers to work with her fingers instead of with brushes — and is nothing if not extremely versatile: dewy, no-makeup skin, custom-made Swarovski crystal face masks and feather-adorned eyelids and brows are all in her wheelhouse. In 2004, she was made global creative design director for Procter & Gamble Beauty, and last spring, Queen Elizabeth II named her a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to the fashion and beauty industries. (To celebrate, McGrath snapped her first selfie.) Here, a closer look at all things in McGrath’s orbit.

As fashion continues to demand ever more output and speed, many designers are finding freedom in the artisanal. Welcome to a season of exposed topstitching, frayed edges, crinkled linen, drawstring burlap and other disciplines of applied art.